scholarly journals Dzieło M.B. Valentiniego Museum museorum i inne publikacje muzeograficzne z gdańskich księgozbiorów oraz ich znaczenie w kształtowaniu zbiorów przyrodniczych i artystycznych w XVII i XVIII wieku

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 131-167
Author(s):  
Antoni Romuald Chodyński
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Previous Knowledge ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Research Objects ◽  
Clear Increase

The work of M.B. Valentini “Museum museorum” and other museographical publications from the Gdańsk book collections and their significance in the formation of the natural history collections in the 17th and 18th centuries After 1700 we observe a clear increase in the number of conscious collectors gathering works of art, naturalia and various curiosities – mirabilia, typical of many Baroque “chambers” (Kammer) that were created by collectors during the previous, 17th century. Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657–1729), court physician at the court of the Landgrave of Hessen, published a compendium of encyclopaedic knowledge, a work for academic collectors of natural history specimens, entitled Museum museorum (Vol. I–II, Frankfurt am Main 1704–1714). Valentini provided information about various noteworthy things found in the Old and New World as well as in Asia (India), sometimes exceeding the limits of previous knowledge, both for researchers and collectors. Valentini’s work may be seen as evidence of a real collector’s fever, directed not only at all kinds of rare and curious things (curiosities) but also research objects collected for study purposes, especially in countries north of the Alps (e.g. natural amber and amber with insect inclusions). This German author recommended in his proposed programme for the creation of an ideal modern museum that objects should be arranged into groups, for example naturalia and artificialia and then divided into more detailed subgroups in order to make them more visible and their content more comprehensible, therefore enriching the knowledge of the surrounding world.

Painted by nature, printed by artists

2022 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 276-312
Author(s):  
V.E. Mandrij
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Similar Technique ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Dutch Painter ◽  
Combine Medium

This article brings the 17th-century Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the contemporary German artist Maximilian Prüfer into dialogue. It investigates in particular Marseus’ and Prüfer’s use of butterfly scales as materials and motifs in their works of art. Both artists developed a similar technique of butterfly imprints (lepidochromy), which consists of transferring the scales of real butterflies onto another surface. The imprints thus combine medium with representation and the object being represented. The artists used a variety of animal substances to make their artworks, some still visible, some not, and gathered living animals to depict after life or to work with in other ways. Knowledge of and interest in natural history inform the work of both artists but their reflections on human relationships with other animals and with ‘nature’ differ.

Exotica and Europe

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-109
Author(s):  
Karen Polinger Foster
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Living Plant

This chapter focuses on exotica in Europe. Many of the botanical and zoological aspects of Versailles were supported by increasingly rigorous scientific studies being carried out in Paris. Since the early 1500s, France’s botanists had sought a permanent facility where living plant specimens could be studied. Indeed, the French were eager to establish a counterpart to the successful research gardens organized in Padua and Pisa. The Jardin du Roi in Paris was meant to make the capital, and by extension France, the world’s pre-eminent center for natural history. Elsewhere in Europe, it was the major banking houses and trading companies that brokered shipments of exotica along with spices, textiles, and other goods. In Italy, wealthy banker and merchant families vied to obtain the latest New World and tropical wonders for their private gardens. The Dutch went further, cannily marketing the entire globe as a rich, alluring repository of exotica, whose possession by nonroyal persons would confer pure delight, free of the burdens of statecraft. From transit pens at the ports of Antwerp and Amsterdam, exotica were sent on to both private and royal customers.

Immature stages of Homophileurus tricuspis Prell (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Phileurini) with notes on natural history and distribution in Colombia

Zootaxa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2915 (1) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
JHON CÉSAR NEITA MORENO ◽  
BRETT C. RATCLIFFE
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Immature Stages ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
First Time

The larva and pupa of Homophileurus tricuspis Prell (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Phileurini) are described for the first time based on specimens from Colombia. A key to the known third-stage larvae of New World Phileurini species is provided. Notes on the natural history and distribution of H. tricuspis in Colombia are also included.

Georg Marcgraf (1610 – c. 1644): A German Cartographer, Astronomer, and Naturalist-Illustrator in Colonial Dutch Brazil

Itinerario ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.P. Brienen
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Botanical Garden ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
West India Company ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
Dutch Brazil

The German scholar Georg Marcgraf was the first trained astronomer in the New World and co-author of the earliest published natural history of Brazil, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam 1648) (Fig. 1). Arriving in the Americas in 1638, Marcgraf took his place among a remarkable group of scholars and painters assembled at the Brazilian court of the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637–1644.1 Dutch Brazil was established by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was created in 1621 to engage in trade, conquest, and colonisation in the Americas and Africa. Except for Marcgraf, the most important members of the Count's entourage were Dutch and included the painters Albert Eckhout (c. 1610 - c. 1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680) and the physician Willem Piso (1611–1678). The rich group of scientific and visual materials they created are comparable in both scope and importance with the works created by Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and others during the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.2 The Count's support of natural history, astronomy, and scientific and ethnographic illustration during his governorship was highly unusual, setting him apart from other colonial administrators and military leaders in the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is responsible for establishing both the first observatory and the first botanical garden in the New World, sparing no expense in creating a princely empire for himself in the Brazilian wilderness.

Renewed investigations at the Folsom Palaeoindian type site

Antiquity ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 74 (283) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
David J. Meltzer
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Projectile Point ◽  
Projectile Points ◽  
Type Site ◽  
Bison Antiquus ◽  
Museum Display

The Folsom site (New Mexico, USA) is justly famous as the place where in 1927 four decades of sometimes bitter controversy came to an end, when it was finally demonstrated humans had been in the New World since the Pleistocene (Meltzer 1993). Folsom became the type site for the Palaeoindian period and distinctive fluted projectile point that bears its name (see Hofman 1999). Yet, as the excavations done in the 1920s by the Colorado (now Denver) and American Museums of Natural History focused initially on the recovery of Bison antiquus skeletons suitable for museum display, and latterly on documenting the association of projectile points with those bison remains, many fundamental questions of interest about the site’s stratigraphic, environmental and archaeological context were left unanswered (and often not asked).

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

Antiquity ◽  
1933 ◽  
Vol 7 (26) ◽  
pp. 203-209
Author(s):  
Violet Alford
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Field Work ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Bow And Arrow ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church

Few people know of this, possibly the most primitive dance in Europe. We find scanty records therefore, the earliest dating only from the 17th century. Robert Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire, 1686, p. 434, says:–At Abbots, or now rather Pagets Bromley, they had also within memory, a sort of sport, which they celebrated at Christmas (on New-Year and Twelft-day) call'd the Hobby-horse dance, from a person that carryed the image of a horse between his leggs, made of thin boards, and in his hand a bow and arrow, which passing through a hole in the bow, and stopping upon a sholder it had in it, he made a snapping noise as he drew it to and fro, keeping time with the Musick: with this Man danced 6 others, carrying on their shoulders as many Rain deers heads, 3 of them painted white, and 3 red, with the Armes of the cheif families (viz.) of Paget, Bagot, and Wells) to whom the revenews of the Town cheifly belonged, depicted on the palms of them, with which they danced the Hays, and other Country dances. To this Hobbyhorse dance there also belong'd a pot, which was kept by turnes, by 4 or 5 of the cheif of the Town, whom they call'd Reeves, who provided Cakes and Ale to put in this pot; all people who had any kindness for the good intent of the Institution of the sport, giving pence a piece for themselves and families; and so forraigners too, that came to see it: with which Mony (the charge of the Cakes and Ale being defrayed) they not only repaired their Church but kept their poore too: which charges are not now perhaps so cheerfully boarn.Why Plot says ‘within memory’ it is difficult to understand, unless there was a temporary cessation of the rite. He might easily have learnt whether the sport still lived or no, but from this and various internal points I suspect the Doctor never went to see for himself. Like too great a number of folklorists he preferred keeping his nose in a book to embarking on ‘field work’. The pot into which they put the feast has now disappeared, and so far from repairing the church and keeping the poor, the few shillings gained hardly pay the dancers for the loss of a day's work.

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